I suppose there’s truth to that, yeah - I get it, but just don’t think the tradeoff is worth it. I know Reddit probably loves the whole “add reddit add the end of your search query” thing people do, and they probably do get some onboarding from it. But my conjecture is that ongoing everyday traffic and content is more important for them, and if that were to dry up the value of the general purpose search results would follow. In my mind, deleting old content disproportionately affects users vs the company.

And just personally, I see value in the old stuff still being there. For many years people put worthwhile information there, and the website wasn’t so aggravatingly user hostile. In the present day, I think the energy is much better spent trying to make alternatives more appealing. Make an account on Lemmy or something, add a post to a community here, that kind of thing.